UC Santa Barbara

Shinto is popularly characterized as the “indigenous religion of Japan,” bound to the Japanese landscape, race, culture, and nation-state. This dissertation interrogates this definition by focusing on the faith and practice of predominantly non-Japanese Shinto practitioners and shrines located outside of Japan. Tracing the religion’s development from premodern kami worship of foreign deities through colonial and universalistic paradigms to the present day, I argue that Shinto has always been global. In fact, overseas Shinto shrines have a long history that goes back centuries, and there have been new developments in the global spread of Shinto thanks to a number of phenomena, including the emergence of the internet, the growing accessibility of international travel such as migration and tourism, Japan’s rise as a pop culture superpower, and general shifts in attitudes toward religion being “spiritual but not religious.”

Based on six years of multi-sited digital ethnographic research, I investigate the growth of transnational Shinto communities connected via social media and concerns issues of authority, authenticity, race, culture, and community. How do non-Japanese individuals outside of Japan position themselves within Shinto tradition as self-identified “Shinto practitioners” given its conventional construction as the “indigenous faith of the Japanese people”? How does Shinto materially “take root” in foreign soil? How do Shinto priests and shrine supporters negotiate the use of digital technology considering the Shinto establishment’s taboo against “internet-mediated worship” in Japan?

This dissertation is comprised of four core chapters which explore the development of Shinto as a global religion and the digital and material aspects of contemporary digital Shinto communities and their ritual practice. Chapter One recontextualizes the history of the development of Shinto as one that has been fundamentally and consistently involved with processes of globalization from premodern kami worship through the end of World War II. Chapter Two traces the development of the contemporary globalization of Shinto in the West, particularly in the continental United States, from the immediate postwar period and the rise of digital Shinto communities. Chapter Three shifts to an ethnographic analysis of emerging global Shinto ideologies of space, place, and the sacred which locate the kami beyond the borders of Japan. examines the construction of Shinto space and place, literally the grounds for global Shinto ritual practice, outside of Japan. Chapter Four moves from shared Shinto spaces to private ones to examine global Shinto practitioners’ domestic worship at their kamidana. This chapter explores the globalization of Shinto through transnational practitioners’ strategic glocalization of everyday ritual practices outside of Japan. The concluding chapter considers the future of both Shinto as a global religion and the longevity of digital Shinto communities and of Global Shinto studies as a field of academic inquiry.